Attack of the Malaysian Moonbats:

Today, a bunch of prominent warbloggers were hit by a
denial-of-service attack apparently orchestrated by a bunch of
comically incompetent al-Qaeda affiliates in Malaysia — and
I wasn't a target.

I'd ask what I've been doing wrong with my life that I missed out
on the honor of being personally targeted by Osama's fuckwit brigade.
But alas, I know full well wherein I failed. This is what I get for
going on hiatus for months to finish my book and put multiple spokes
in the wheels of SCO. I didn't maintain the momentum I had in
2002/early-2003, and fell off the moonbats' radar.

To all of you who were targeted -- Internet Hagannah, InstaPundit,
Steve denBeste, Charles Johnson, and others: you have my respect and
my thanks for what you do every day. The war against terror is a war
of ideas as well as bullets. You do great service by unflinchingly
exposing the lies of the terror network and its apologistsin the
West. The Malaysian Moonbats, in recognizing this, have paid you
greater tribute than I can.

Why Howard Dean Won't Get My Vote:

After a previous post in which I called for the Democratic Party to
walk the pro-firearms walk if it wanted to stop alienating freedom-loving
independents like me, I was asked in comments what I think of Howard Dean
— who, it is alleged, has an A++ rating from the NRA.

OK, I like the fact that Dean is pro-gun. In this, and in other
ways, he's sane on subjects where Democrats are generally insane. But
it is almost certain I will not vote for him. Because the next
President of the U.S. must have a strategic vision for fighting the
threat of Islamist terror and WMDs, and Dean has no such vision.

Note that I am not saying the next president must have George
Bush's strategic vision — and don't bother with the
Bush-is-an-idiot, it's-all his-handlers routine; Bush has routinely
outsmarted people who underestimated him and as long as they delude
themselves that he's a moron, it will be easier for him to continue
doing so. But there must be some strategic vision, some
sense of realpolitik. Dean ain't got it.

In fact, nobody on the list of Democratic presidential hopefuls
appears to have any sense of the strategic stakes or possibilities,
with the possible exception of Joe Lieberman. And supposing there
were, no aspirant with a sane national-security program could make it
through the gauntlet of the primaries to the general election.

And why? Because the Democratic Party apparatus has been captured by
interest groups who are incapable of taking the war we are in seriously.

I'm not actually talking about the inmates of the asylum that is
today's loony left: the retread Marxists, the po-mo academics, the
anti-globalization crowd — what conservatives call with some
justification the Blame-America-First brigades. Expecting anything
but toxic babble from these people was always doomed. No, the trouble
is that the Democratic interest groups that aren't outright
insane have no way to fit an anti-terror strategy into their model of
how to do politics.

How can feminists, gays, or the various skin-color cliques in the
racial-problem industry cope? For these groups, politics is all about
identity and grievance and maybe who gets the biggest slice in the
next round of redistributing the domestic wealth — they've
actually lost the very *concept* of the 'national interest', and are no
more capable of grappling with the implications of 9/11 than they
would be of speaking Sumerian.

Or the people who are *really* calling the shots in the Democratic
Party — trial lawyers and the public-employee unions. (Forget
labor in general. The Democrats stopped listening to the AFL-CIO
about a nanosecond after it became clear that the private-sector
unions could no longer keep most of their people from voting
Republican.) Again, nothing about their relationship to the political
game gives them anywhere to stand in foreign policy.

The Republicans don't have this problem. All of their major
factions have commitments that don't stop at the water's edge. The
so-called "national-greatness conservatives", the ideological
free-traders, small business, big business, the Christian Right, even
the Buchananite isolationalists — they may disagree violently on
what the national interest is, but at least there is a place in their
normal discourse about politics where they know that concept
fits.

Not so most of the the Democrat pressure groups — which means
that the terms of internal Democratic debate about foreign policy are
being set by the loony left, because the people some of my warblogger
colleagues call "barking idiotarian moonbats" are the only ones in the
Democratic Party who actually care! They're the only Democrats
with a world-view that involves thinking about the rest of the world
as anything other than a passive backdrop for domestic politics.

(I'm actually convinced that the reason most Democratic politicians
suck up to the U.N. and the French so assiduously is that following
"international opinion" relieves them of the intolerable burden of
having to think about foreign policy.)

Thus, Dean. Mostly a mainstream Democrat in that what he really wants to
do is ignore foreign-policy issues — but the only way he's found
to mobilize the angry-Left cadres who matter so much in the primaries
is to bark like a moonbat.

That won't get my vote.

posted by Eric at 8:57 PM

Sunday, October 19, 2003

Hey, DLC, Rethinking Is Not Enough:

The Democratic Party is getting hip to the fact that advocating
gun bans loses them elections. Way to go, Dems! For a crowd
widely touted in the media as the best and brightest, it has taken you
far too long to wake up.

But there is still a weird feeling of unreality about the exercise. It
seems to be mostly about spin rather than substance, mostly about making
people believe that Democrats have reformed on this issue without actual
reform.

Various bloggers have waxed acidulous about this, but nobody has stepped
up and said, explicitly, what the Democrats' problem is and how to fix it.
So. DLC honchos, you talk about being reality therapy for the rest of the
party. Here is reality.

I am one of the independent, swing voters that could have won you the
2000 election. I do not consider myself a conservative, nor do I vote the
Republican ticket.

I believe that the Founding Fathers of the United States bequeathed
to me as a member of the unincorporated militia (that is, all citizens
capable of bearing arms) the responsibility to remain armed and
vigilent against both foreign enemies of my nation and domestic
tyrants.

I am one of the people who will almost never vote for a Democrat, because
I believe the Democratic Party wants to trash the Second Amendment, confiscate
my guns, and destroy the balance of power between citizens and government
that was intended by the framers of the Constitution.

I do not really trust either major political party on this issue, but
whereas Republicans have less than sterling credibility, Democrats have
negative credibility. That is, experience strongly suggests
that when Democrats are quiet about firearms policy, they are concealing
an anti-gun rather than a pro-gun agenda. Their silence is a lie.

Democratic pollster Mark Penn says "The formula for Democrats is to
say that they support the Second Amendment, but that they want tough
laws that close loopholes". Be aware that I will interpret any
Democrat talking about "tough laws that close loopholes" as an
anti-gun agenda being pursued by stealth and deception.

If the Democrats want my vote, it is not sufficient for the
Democratic merely to refrain from pushing more firearms restrictions.
The Democratic leadership must explicitly recognize the Second
Amendment as a guarantee of an individual right, explicitly repudiate
the gun-grabbers in their ranks, and make the abolition of
firearms restrictions part of their formal agenda.

Negative credibility means you have a ways to go before you can
even get to zero. Want my vote, and that of millions of independent
gun owners like me? Start earning it with pro-gun action, not just
talk...because if you don't, those millions of independents will have
no realistic option but the Republicans, and the already serious
decline of the national Democratic party may well become terminal.